They aren’t going to save theatre. They’ve got an 80-seat majority for another four years & this pandemic is an expensive business. Theatre doesn’t create Tory voters and, let’s face it, most of the people who work in theatre wouldn’t vote Tory even if they *did* bail us out. 1/8

The cultural argument won’t work: our values & goals - empathy, community, vocation and collaboration - are not useful to them. These days, more than ever before, the Tories rely on division, fear and our mistrust of each other to power their electoral successes. 2/8

The economic argument won’t work: if they cared about value for money and a return on investment, they wouldn’t be engineering a no-deal Brexit cliff-edge when the transition period ends on New Year’s Eve. 3/8

The human argument won’t work: at best, they simply don’t understand what motivates people who work in theatre. At worst, they’d rather the industry ended up staffed entirely by wealthy hobbyists, because it would be less likely to make work that challenges their worldview. 4/8

The most important work theatres do is in expanding the reach of storytelling, and in empowering people from every community to speak their truth. That work will be far harder to do when the dust settles and whatever remains of our industry tries to start again from scratch. 5/8

So they’ll wring their hands, they’ll say “the show must go on,” they’ll pretend to be terribly sad about it all. But they won’t help, because they see no real advantage to themselves, to their party, to their donors and to their ideology. 6/8

“Why won’t they intervene? Why won’t they do their jobs?”, you say. You misunderstand what they perceive their jobs to be. A crisis is an opportunity to reshape society. The present moment has provided them with two enormous crises at once: COVID-19 & Brexit. Nevertheless... 7/8

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